PREVIEW-Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)

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0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 41 what does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We've read Brain Trust, the new book by Patricia Churchland, professor emeritus at University of California, San Diego, featuring as a guest right here in the show, Pat Churchland herself. My name is Mark Lintonmeyer in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:07 Unknown speaker: And my name's Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:10 Mark: Ooh, you've moved a whole hundred yards since last. Since last episode.

1:17 Wes: And this is Wes.

1:20 Mark: Wes said he had an emergency five minutes before the recording and could not come on.

1:26 Unknown speaker: That's just bizarre.

1:29 Mark: So Pat Churchland will be on with us in a few minutes. We thought we'd chat a little first.

1:33 Unknown speaker: Okay.

1:33 Mark: We don't have to explain to her why we were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. So says the intro. I don't know if she's ever actually listened to the show. I did send her the Philosophy of Mind episode where Wes was especially critical of Dennett, who, according to the introduction to her 1986 book, Book Neurophilosophy, Dennett was instrumental in getting her to write that book. Oh, it's all connected.

1:59 Unknown speaker: Well, she seems to be interested in scientific grounding and a kind of pragmatic attitude with respect to it without reducing it. She's skeptical of overexcited reduction of neurological research into a kind of deterministic formulation of how morals work. That's, to me, one thing I'm most interested in hearing her talk about is the big problem with, to me, overly scientific accounts of morality as rooted in our emotions or our hormones or whatever, is that there's a kind of one to one correspondence that once you've sorted out what that gene was, that morality gene, then you'd understand exactly what moral decisions ought to be made.

So you kind of displace the universalism of Kant or something. Like that into a biological universalism. But she embraces this notion of biology and mind, of the many to many, the organized network kind of mode that involves multiple solutions to multiple problems, so that the notion of what judgment is ends up playing a great role in it. There's social effects, there's biological effects. But I'm interested in what the notion of judgment is on her part and how that comes into morality, what judgment is as a faculty in explaining phenomenologically the way we make decisions.

She says, well, we make decisions, we take up many valued parameter space and come up with a solution to the problem. I'd like to hear more about how she thinks of that working. And in particular seems that you're going to have to maybe not have a theory of mind, but some kind of understanding of how things ought to be working to make predictions. So there's some underlying assumed causal relations that you have in your own mind implicitly or explicitly.

3:42 Mark: Looks like we are approaching the time. Hello, Pat. Hi, I'm here with Dylan Casey.

3:49 Unknown speaker: Hi, Pat.

3:50 Wes: Hi there.

3:50 Mark: Dylan has done a number of these with us. He's actually my brother in law.

3:54 Wes: Oh, okay.

3:55 Mark: So I edit these pretty heavily after the fact, so you can be really rude about your colleagues and I'll take that.

4:02 Wes: Am I to take that as encouragement?

4:06 Mark: It's a combative. Your work does not seem combative, but certainly the discussions of scientism that it engenders are heated.

4:14 Wes: Although it's quite interesting. You know, I've been reading Hume in the Treatise again and it's remarkable how combative he is. I mean, he really takes on the people that he regards as the opposition and it's really slash and burn. Yes.

4:28 Mark: Commit them to the flames.

4:29 Wes: Yes, that. Yes, exactly. Anyway, he's so wonderful to read.

4:35 Mark: Yeah. So we thought we'd start this off. We're going to talk for the most part about Pat's book. But you mentioned Hume a number of times in here as both a foundation of your work and as a figure that's sometimes brought up to argue that the entire point is just wrongheaded of what you're doing, that the the is ought distinction is so sharp as Hume describ that talking about brain physiology in the context of morality is useless. So we thought we'd look at a few of the quotes in here, just as with most Hume. Right. He took the first stab at it at the Treatise of Human Nature and then some years later went back to

5:09 Wes: it in the Inquiries concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. And it's the Principles of Morals part at the end that, of course, I was mostly focusing on for this discussion. I was introduced to Hume as an undergraduate, and it seemed very reasonable and very sensible. But then, of course, as you take other classes, Hume comes in for a lot of criticism. So over the years, I looked at many other points of view so far as the origin and the nature of morality was concerned. And I kept finding myself coming back to Hume. I guess that I still do, even though I have looked hard and long at many others, including, of course, Kant and Rawls and Nozick, who I know has been a subject of discussion on your blog.

6:01 Mark: I'm almost embarrassed that you're actually, I know I had sent you a link to an old episode. Had you listened to any of that? I'm just curious.

6:11 Wes: Yes, yes and no. I thought that Metcalfe's article on Nozick was really very interesting and was obviously very thoughtful, very well researched, and I think he opened up some really important issues. And so when I went back to look at Hume, the discussion that's most relevant to Nozick is the discussion in book three on justice. And he makes it plain that it's in our interest to live together in groups and to cooperate. And we all sort of know that, that there are these enormous benefits that accrue to you if you live in groups and then you have a division of labor and you can take advantage of other people's knowledge and skills and so forth.

And we. And then he goes on to say, so as you grow older and as you leave childhood behind, you recognize that it's in your interest to sometimes make sacrifices for the good of the group because of the benefits of group living. And so I started thinking about Nozick in that context and how he evaluates liberty so highly. Now, of course, Hume evaluates liberty highly as well. But Hume, I think, would say to Nozick, yes, of course, that's very important. But if it is to the detriment of the group as a whole that nobody ever pay taxes, you may want to rethink that, because the stability of the group is extremely important.

Now, Hume, like Hobbes, of course, was very sensitive to issues of stability because the Civil War was still very much on their mind, and it had been truly, truly horrifying. And they realized, which we sometimes, I think, don't always, that our social institutions can be very fragile and that instabilities that undermine social institutions can be very, very destructive.

7:58 Mark: That addresses very specifically what the first chapter of your book focuses on. And what seemed to be one of Hume's focuses, which is arguing against the claim from Hobbes that everybody is primarily selfish. And that's something that we just have to deal with in considering the foundations of morality, that maybe morality is something that not come from human nature itself. Human nature is selfish and so we need morality to protect us against our own nature or something. But you've claimed that the same mechanisms that in fact self interest itself is an evolutionary leap.

8:28 Wes: Yeah.

8:29 Mark: You had described it as a system of internal balance.

8:32 Wes: Yes, that's right. And that in all organisms there is very well organized and well protected circuitry for seeing to self survival and self well being. And that what really changed with mammals was a sort of extension of that circuitry to the care and well being of the offspring. And then of course, over evolutionary time, as mammals spread out and found new ways of living, then other small changes took place to sort of alter the sociality in various ways. And you could think of that in terms of the expansion of the circle of people within your group.

9:11 Mark: Some people seem to, again the libertarian camp, seem to act as if self interest is self evident and there's something inconceivable.

9:18 Wes: That's right.

9:19 Mark: If anybody says you're doing something altruistic, then well, that's just because it makes them feel good or something like that. And in a sense they're right that it's the same brain circuitry that makes you care for yourself that is just tweaked here to expand that circle. It's really, it's almost a redefinition of what self is. That self is not just this organism. It includes, at least in some circumstances, when you know if the lion is coming to get you.

9:43 Wes: I think that's quite right. And you can see in non human primates, such as monkeys, for example, that individuals in the group will come to the aid of a baby who has been captured by a python. And they mob the python and they hit him and they bite him and they extract the baby from the python's coils. And this is behavior that's not alien to them in the sense that it's not sort of imposed on them by an external force. And their own nature is against it. It's really an expression of their nature. And of course we see a very similar thing in the case of humans and not just their own offspring, but also the offspring of others.

And Hume actually is great on this too because he has a passage, this is again in the section on justice where he addresses the question of aren't we really just selfish and the rest is imposed and alien to us. And he said, do you not see by common experience always that parents sacrifice enormously for their offspring and that a man may garner wealth, but that he gives most of it to his children and to his wife and he sees to their interests often before he sees to his own. It goes on and on. Now, of course we know that that doesn't always happen and so forth.

But it's very interesting that in order to make the case for saying that cooperation and social life is very natural and not contrary to our nature, Hume stor by making that case with regard to the family. And then he says, you can see that it's in your interest to belong to a group. And slowly over time, these responses become very automatic. These responses to cooperate and to engage in group living and to sacrifice to take a cost sometimes to yourself in order that the group as a whole may thrive. So he understood that very well. And I find that amazing, actually.

11:45 Unknown speaker: How would you contrast that kind of claim by Hume with Aristotle's the human being is a political animal in the primacy of family and that kind of thing?

11:54 Wes: Well, you know, I think they're very close. I think Aristotle basically understood much the same thing, that political animal. I think he meant political in the broadest sense. I think he meant what Hume and what I would mean by a social animal. And you know, they're very similar also, I think in understanding that ethics is fundamentally a very practical business about solving practical problems of social life, of how we can do things in such a way as to preserve well being my own, but the well being of others. And Hume makes those remarks throughout the book on morality in the treatise, but also in the inquiry.

But of course it's all there in Aristotle. And they're similar in this other respect, which I find to be really quite interesting. And that is they both realize that social institutions of criminal justice, of enforcing contracts of defense are not just kind of throwaway political things, but in a certain way are the essence of taking morality from being the province of a very small group to being what you need to prosper in a large group. And what's so interesting to me is that so much of contemporary moral philosophy's missed all that.

13:09 Unknown speaker: What I take is that the conventional way of thinking about these problems is what is a moral choice for an individual without paying attention to the notion that we are embedded creatures, that part of being human is being an individual and part of being human is being a part of a community, and that those Aren't exclusive things.

13:30 Wes: Oh, no, they're essential. And I think actually the European philosophers understood that in a way in which the American philosophers did not. That is, that part of who you are and makes you the person that you are and gives you the kind of quality of life that you can have is being a member of the group and having a role in the group and learning the group conventions and practices and then learning to improve upon those conventions and practices. And, of course, the problem was that when the Europeans talked about those things, they made it sound so weird and woolly and difficult and obscure that people would just sort of throw the book down and say, oh, you know, to hell with it. And you'd go back to the clarity of somebody like John Rawls. But Rawls, I think, didn't really get to the heart of the matter.

14:17 Mark: Well, that's interesting. You know, I usually think of Nietzsche, who has, I think, a very similar ethical view in terms of let's look at what human nature actually is. And there really is no normativity other than what comes from our own impulses or how we deal with other people. But yet he never made that leap to explicitly, at least, being systematic about the political, because the political is big and scary. Sharing with, maybe the way American philosophers often think about ethics, that the essence of the moral situation is I, right now as an individual, am in some situation. You know, maybe I'm in chains. Maybe I'm in a concentration camp.

14:51 Wes: That's right.

14:51 Mark: It doesn't matter how unfree my situation is, but what is it my duty to do in that situation, as opposed to this state building, which even back to Plato's Republic, those were considered. Those problems go hand in hand. You can't even really talk about the virtues of the individual without talking about the virtues of the state.

15:08 Wes: Yeah, no, that's right. And Hume certainly understood the importance of institutions, but certainly, clearly so did Aristotle. And they thought that a good deal of our sort of moral efforts ought to go into trying to figure out what kinds of institutions would promote prosperity and stability and what kinds of institutions would undermine them. And that is, I think, an important part of the contemporary, very public conversation right now about morality. And the case in point really has to do with the drug laws. The drug laws that came about as a result of the war and drugs and all that stuff have been a source of absolutely horrendous grief and misery. And of course, as this new report has shown, this war on drugs has been a colossal failure. And so part of what we have to do now is sort of figure out, well then what should we do? This is a huge moral consequence.

16:00 Unknown speaker: I agree, but it's interesting that you pick that example because I think it crystallizes the conflict about what morality is in that on the other side of that you have people saying, well, taking drugs is just wrong. And so you have a maybe it's a kind of universalism, but it's a notion that that kind of moral distinction is writ in stone and you appeal to something outside of something like a pragmatic sussing out of what would be beneficial, compromise or solution to a many valued problem between individual activity and group activity.

16:35 Wes: No, no, I mean, I think that is an important moral domain. I mean, I don't want to suggest that the only important moral domain has to do with public institutions that affect us all because of course on a day by day basis each of us does make decisions and often they are consequential in terms of the prosperity and misery and well being of others. So I don't think that's a conflict. But I think you're right to say that when you think about something like the drug laws, you want to take many, many things into account. That includes the consequences of having a war on drugs that causes a lot of misery and is inefficacious and is very expensive.

So you ask, are there better ways of doing things? And I think that's as moral a question as some of the questions that arise for an individual. Should I blow whistle on Mrs. X, for example? So they're all part of our moral life. It's just that, you know, if you're living 200,000 years ago in a small group, you have a very different set of moral questions than you do if you live in a hugely complex society as ours is.

17:40 Mark: So to give a contrast to the way we've talked about this on this podcast before we had a discussion of Kant's ethics. He insisted that morality comes direct from reason. It has to be a categorical imperative. It has to imply in all circumstances, regardless of what your individual desires are. Of course, he had read Hume and is reacting specifically to this. And Hume's position, on the other hand, was that it's all hypothetical. We can still talk about what you should do and what laws we should pass, but it's really based on consistency with what you already find yourself believing, right?

18:11 Wes: Well, up to a point for Hume. And I think this is also true of how I see it now that we know something about the neurobiology. For Hume, there is the moral sentiment and what that does is provides a disposition so that you will consider certain kinds of alternatives, that you will find certain options unacceptable, and others. Okay. But the moral sentiment in and of itself doesn't provide answers to moral questions. It sort of puts you into the space of moral reasons, if you like. And once you're there, then facts are important, memories what other people think, history and all this comes together in a certain way to help you make a decision about what you ought to do.

Where Hume and Kant differ, really, I think, is with regard to this fundamental moral platform. And Hume is sometimes read quite wrongly, I think, as being a sort of simple, if your guts tell you, do X, do X. And of course, that's clearly not so. He's not a simple emotivist in any sense at all. And he goes on in many places to talk about how reason can actually provoke a moral response, or that it can stimulate a particular moral passion to do this or to do that. So he knows that the story is going to be very complex. And I fancy that the very vague account that I have of constraint satisfaction as a process whereby nervous systems light on a solution is the kind of thing that would have appealed to Hugh.

And I think constraint satisfaction is something that we can roughly understand in all animal decision making, even rats, where the variables are very well controlled. But I think it also seems to be something about the way humans make decisions as well, whether those decisions are made very quickly and automatically, or whether they are made over many days as one struggles to sort of find a good resolution. But I think constraint satisfaction is what's going on, and that means it's not just reason in the sense of deduction. There's all kinds of perceptions and emotions and memories and so forth.

20:24 Unknown speaker: Well, if I substituted the word judgment for constraint satisfaction, where I understood judgment, broadly speaking, is not merely satisfying the outputs of, for lack of a better term, reason in my brain, but understood it as being the weighing of all kinds of unspeakable things. Would that be congruous to what you're talking about?

20:45 Wes: Yeah, I think it is. It's just that the judgment is sort of the outcome of the constraint satisfaction process.

20:52 Unknown speaker: Sure, I guess I was thinking of the judgment muscle, maybe, or the activity. And I don't want to say it that way. I don't want to say that there's a neurobiological muscle out there.

21:01 Wes: I take your point. But I mean, in all animals we see that when they need to make a decision, there is some sort of process that goes on where their immediate perception and what They've learned and various other factors sort of come to bear. And it's as though the brain sort of goes into a local minimum. The decision is made and the rat makes its choice, or the monkey or the person, or what have you. Part of the problem too is that Hume, when he is sort of expressing skepticism about the role of reason in morality, he means by reason there deduction and likens it to the kind of certainty that you get with algebra and geometry. But of course, he also knows that there is this other thing that we also sometimes call reasoning or which Peirce would have called abduction, whereby you make an inference to the best decision.

21:52 Unknown speaker: Yes.

21:52 Wes: And that's what you think of, I think, as judgment.

21:55 Unknown speaker: That's what I'm thinking of. And I had a question about that in the way in which that judgment worked with respect to. I'm thinking of what the notion of expectation is in general that allows for predictive behavior. So that when you make a judgment, you also have implicit assumptions about what's going to happen in the dynamics. And so some of that is going to be from habit and experience. You drop the ball, it goes down all the time, that kind of thing. And others are going to have to do with the kind of social things that you speak about in your book, that you learn those things. I guess the way in which that works that I'm most interested in is that however this works, it allows for refinement of that predictive power so that you come up with different conclusions so that there's something like figuring out that results in a new conclusion that wasn't there before.

22:51 Wes: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. And we don't really understand that process very well. It's probably got analogs in reasoning about the physical world where somebody is using a tool and then it occurs to them that if they made a slight adjustment, it would work better this way and that way. I think it's the same kind of process. And suddenly, you know, you started off with just a sharp rock and then after a few modifications you have it tied to a stick and now you've got a spear that you can use to catch fish. And we do that in the moral domain as well. But that sort of creativity, of course, humans are extraordinarily good at. You see it to a degree in animals also, especially primates.

23:40 Unknown speaker: Well, let me ask this question in sort of a moral context. You might ask. Acknowledge. Okay. Back in 500 BC as part of their social structure, slaves were an intrinsic part of it. But what we can do is we can say, okay, look, we know slavery is wrong and that they could have known that then and they just made a mistake. Another way of saying it would be that, well, based upon their social structure and so forth, I guess the question of its wrongness across that time could be more complicated. And I would contrast that with something, something like our disposition with respect to sunburns that now the convention is that you go out in the sun and you wear sunscreen and there's a sense that getting a tan is not necessarily, in general, very healthy.

And that was not true 30 years ago. Smoking would be another example where it's not quite so clearly moral in the way slavery is, even if people can have a kind of moralism about it. But. But there's a different set of standards and judgments that have developed. And we wouldn't be uncomfortable in the case of smoking or in the case of sun tanning to say, well, people just thought differently back then and we think differently now, and there's no big whoop about that. But with slavery, we would feel differently about that. The universalism would come out in the argument.

And so I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the notion of the way in which morals may change based upon social circumstances over time. Because that's where a lot of the kind of fist pumping and table banging comes in, in this.

25:12 Wes: No, I think you're right. There has been a sort of scapegoating of the notion of relativism in a way that has masked important things about social behavior. Obviously, we don't want to say that something is right. If someone thinks it's right, we can't go that direction. On the other hand, and actually, Philip Kitcher is very good on this point, and he said, don't use the word relativism. Use the word pluralism as a way of acknowledgin that relative to certain ecological conditions and relative to certain needs and the traditions that people have and the history of where they are, a certain practice may be one that from our particular vantage point and level of prosperity, we think is wrong.

We can still say that their practice is wrong, but without condemning it in a way that makes us look arrogant and smug and foolish. But there are other kinds of cases that I think are a little bit different. If you think about the practice of infanticide, which was practiced very widely in all cultures until very recently and actually still in some cultures is practiced quite a lot. I mean, amongst the Inuit, to take the easiest example, where they always lived on the knife edge of survival every year was A fight against starvation. It was not unreasonable if they had too many mouths to feed and yet another girl was born to feel sad and regretful, but to let it go.

Now, if the only alternative is that everybody starves, then you can understand why there was such a practice. But it's also important to realize the practice was not one that people took great joy and delight in. I mean, they didn't toss the baby into the ocean and laugh about it or anything of that kind.

27:01 Unknown speaker: It wasn't based on desirability. It was based upon a kind of judgment.

27:05 Wes: And I think in the case of slavery in Greece, of course, it was a very, very different institution from slavery as we knew it in, let's say, Alabama or Mississippi. And often slaves were freed, they were often educated, they were treated with quite a lot of respect. So you can look at Aristotle with his slaves and you think, oh, how dreadful. But if you actually take the time to put it in the context of what life was like for those slaves and their expectations and the style of life that people led, then you back off condemning it as something that is just horrendous.

It wasn't horrendous. And I am betting that every table thumping abolitionist who lived in Athens at that time with that set of social practices would have had slaves. We like to think that our knowledge is so deep and that we are so good that we never would have. I'm betting you would have. At least I'm betting I would have.

28:12 Unknown speaker: Well, it's a little bit like every time people think about living in the past, they always imagine themselves as being part of royalty rather than one of the serfs.

28:22 Wes: That's sort of right. And even I think in the recent past, you know, when one thinks about attitudes that men have had towards women and you think, well, like I had a wonderful mathematics teacher in high school and he did this very generous thing of holding calculus classes after school for the few of us who going on to college. Except that he wouldn't let any of the girls take the class on grounds that we wouldn't be able to do calculus. Now I still love the guy. He was a wonderful teacher. He was mixed up about that. I'm sure he changed his mind after he had five daughters.

28:58 Mark: But, you know, did you send him your book after neurophilosophy, this giant Victobe.

29:04 Wes: And so I can't bring myself to condemn him. I think he was wrong about that. Okay, fine, fine. Enough said.

29:10 Mark: Yeah, I think this pluralism makes more sense to me when you're taking the approach that you're taking that Hume taking, which I guess I call a bottom up approach rather than a top down approach, that we're not looking for universal rules. Even when moral philosophers turned away from specifically trying to figure out what the scripture says should be the rules for everybody and when they made the turn to like Locke say of let's justify these things through reason instead, they were still had the top down paradigm, the divine command paradigm driving them.

29:40 Wes: Oh, I think so.

29:41 Mark: A lot of what you're saying in terms of how reason can inform moral judgments and how the complexities enter and as you said, they turn into arguments about facts. And I want to make sure we hit that. I mean you can say you can't get values strictly from facts. In fact, folks that have, you know, their brains can be working perfectly well in terms of the way that they understand facts. But if the part of their brain that drives the valuing is not working correctly, they can be psychopathic.

30:06 Wes: Absolutely.

30:07 Mark: I don't want to oversimplify this as you were warning against and say, well, whatever desires you have, that's what morality is. I mean that's certainly oversimplifying.

30:14 Wes: Clearly not. So that's clearly wrong.

30:16 Mark: But that's the foundation, right, that you have to start with what purposes people actually find themselves having. And then it's just a matter that they have to live in a society. And so if their purposes, if some of them are rather antisocial and at cross purposes with each other, then by the fact that they're living together, they're forced to, you know, in what sort of laws are we going to come up with? Well, unless I, the absolute tyrant, I can't have it reflect solely my often selfish desire.

30:45 Wes: That's right. Although Hume makes a claim that everybody has a moral sentiment, in an interesting way he was right and in another way he was wrong. I mean the right part of it is that it does look like normally if an infant is loved and reared in a loving environment and is not abused and so forth, that they grow up with very normal social responses, that that is, they are disposed to cooperate, to help, to be generous, to care about other people. And there's some evidence, but I mean this is still really early days, but there is some evidence that psychopathy is linked to abuse as a child.

If the child just doesn't get cuddling and nurturing and love when it's an infant or if it's beaten up and so forth later. And I think that's really quite an infinite interesting thing that sociality is so strong that it really takes quite a lot in order to sort of change the wiring to make the person different.

31:43 Mark: Right. When you're saying it's early, you're saying that we don't know a lot about the mechanisms that make that possible and have the experimental documentation of let's have a control group that treats their kids normally. Can you 12 people abuse your kids from their birth? And then we'll measure. You know, we can't.

32:00 Wes: I mean, what you know from rat studies is that if you take the pups when they're born, take them from the mother so that she doesn't do the usual things, which involves a lot of licking and there's her warm body and so forth. You take them away, you feed them, you keep them warm. And they do grow up with a different neural chemistry, that is their oxytocin and vasopressin organization is different. And socially their behavior is different. They don't carry on properly, they don't mate properly, they don't take care of their own pups properly.

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